I just got back from RoboCup in Atlanta, GA (ok, I actually got back 3 weeks ago, but I’m just getting around to writing about it). RoboCup is basically the world cup of robot soccer. Our team is UT Austin Villa, and we compete in the legged league, where we play four on four soccer using Sony Aibo robots. All the teams have the same robots, so its mainly a programming competition. There are lots of difficult problems to solve, such as vision, localization, movement, behaviors, and communication. I’ve worked a lot on the localization, which means having the robot figure out where it is from the landmarks that it sees. I also worked a lot on the goalie, and then a little bit on many many other aspects of the team.

RoboCup was pretty crazy. We were in the ballroom of the Fox Theater, which was built in the 1920s. In the ballroom they had three soccer fields set up, and there was a side room where all the teams had their own tables. Every day we were there from 7 am (when it opened) to 10 pm (when they kicked us out). Everyone is there trying to fix things at the last minute and making adjustments after games. The team from Bowdoin College, Northern Bites, was especially relentless, you would always hear them having discussions about minute details of the robot soccer strategy and constantly trying to improve.

Our first game was against Carnegie Mellon, where my advisor went to school. So it was a big rivalry. Tekin and I got to the venue when it opened at 7 am to try to fix the many problems we saw the night before but we ended up losing to Carnegie Mellon 4-2 (video). We had some shots on goal but missed most of them wide of the post. We played a team from Japan, FC Twaves, in the afternoon. We were hoping to win this one, but they scored first. Then we had a problem where our robot got switched to the other team and it scored on our own goal. So we were down 2-0 to this team with a few minutes left in the half but luckily we managed to score three goals in about four and a half minutes and we won 4-2. The start of this video is right after their 2^nd goal and shows us (in blue) scoring three goals in four and a half minutes. This game was stressful, Tekin and I were both pretty concerned when they took a 2-0 lead, but thankfully we came back to win.

After playing pretty poorly in the two games on the first day, Tekin and I worked pretty hard that night and the next morning to try to fix things. We improved ball-grabbing, ball following, ball vision, shooting, and communication and strategy, among other things. The next day, the team looked the best I had seen it. If you compare the videos from the first two games and the videos from these three, you will see a significant difference. We beat the Baby Tigers from Osaka by a score of 5-0 and then beat SPQR by 5-0 as well. Baby Tigers has a ridiculous kick where they climb over the ball and shoot it out from behind (video). Our third game was against the German Team, who are one of the best teams, and won the German Open this year. They had won 3 of their 4 earlier games by 10-0 scores (after 10-0 the game is called). We managed to hold them to 3-0, which I was pretty excited about. My goalie looked really good during the game, making some sweet saves. A few people who worked on goalies from other teams came up to me afterward to tell me how good it looked, which was really cool. Here is the video from the first and second halves of the game against the German Team. UT is in red in the first half and blue in the second half.

Winning two of our three second round games meant that we made it to the quarterfinals, which is better than UT did last year. Considering there were only three of us at RoboCup (most teams had 5-12 people), I was pretty happy. We played Wright Eagle from China in the quarterfinal match. We were really slow in the first half because of some network issues so they went up 4-0. In the second half that was fixed and they only scored one goal. The entire second half consisted of the ball being right around and in front of our goal, and they were repeatedly taking shots and my goalie kept making nice saves. My goalie looked great, but I don’t think we ever had the ball on their half of the field. Here is the video from this game. Even though we lost in the quarterfinals, I was pretty happy with our performance.

Watching the championship games was pretty exciting. After talking to and hanging out with all the guys on the other teams all week I was definitely hoping some teams would win more than others. Plus all of the final four teams were really good so it was really entertaining to watch. Carnegie Mellon won 3^rd place over Wright Eagle in a game that went to overtime and took 8 penalty shots before CMU prevailed. The championship was between Northern Bites from Maine and NU Bots from Australia. Northern Bites won 5-1. Here is the video of the championship game.

It was cool to see most of the teams get really into the games. TecRams from Mexico and Araibo from Japan both decided to cheer for Carnegie Mellon because CMU came out of the same first round group as them. During CMU’s games they would all be screaming and yelling. Araibo was probably the loudest team there, they were constantly screaming, yelling “GO GO GO” on offense and chanting “Goalie! Goalie!” on defense. I also was head referee for one of their games and it was hard to make calls over all their screaming. I have a great video of Araibo, TecRams, and CMU celebrating a goal during one of Carnegie Mellon’s games.

RoboCup was really cool and a lot of fun. It was a lot of work, not only at RoboCup, but all the work in the months leading up to RoboCup. But it was definitely a lot of fun. It was really cool to hang out with guys from other teams all over the world. One night we went out to dinner with guys from the German Team, Microsoft Hellhounds (Germany), NU Bots (Australia) and Northern Bites (Maine). Good times

Here are some various links to cool stuff. Northern Bites has a blog, which is very detailed and has some interesting stories. I have a set of photos I took at RoboCup along with some other photos I stole along the way. All the videos that we took of RoboCup are available at UT Austin Villa’s website. And here is a link to some photos on Time magazine’s website about RoboCup. Here are sets of random RoboCup photos and videos. Here is the full website with all of the results from the Legged League. Another really cool event at Robocup was the first ever game played with robots and humans, that video is available here.